WHAT
is called the ‘Air Age’ was beginning to gain acceptance as early as
the 1930s. Businessmen and women, always in a hurry to get things done,
had started taking the air service from London to Paris in place of
doing it by train and ferry. If they made a dawn start, they could be in
Paris soon after the lunch hour. That way, they could squeeze in a
couple of hours with their French contacts so that they were free to
have their night on the town before catching the morning plane back to
London.

I wonder what today’s
jet-setters would think of that journey.

"The roar of the
propellers was shattering," one who made it tells us. "The
little windows kept sliding open and chilled you to the bone. I was sick
in the brown paper bag" which was about all that the air company
provided in the way of on-board service. Not knowing what to do with the
used bag, he carried it and deposited it in the lavatory which
"opened directly into the void." The only other passenger on
the flight, a smartly dressed businesswoman, treated him to a look of
"frightful scorn".

But if the way we are
transported from place to place has changed beyond recognition, so have
the places we travel to. Admitting that Paris and London, Rome, Madrid,
Prague have noble buildings which give them distinct identities, most
other cities and towns are no more than untidy sprawls of squatter
shelters filling put their open spaces. They’re formless, overcrowded,
dirty, unsightly.

And some are like
battle-zones and where, as Mahatma Gandhi once predicted: "not a
man, woman or child is safe and every man’s hand is raised against his
neighbour."

It was not always so. Who
would believe it today that Palestine was once a land where cruise-ships
made brief stopovers? Evelyn Waugh, who went there on a winter cruise in
1930, tells us that, while he was disappointed with the architecture of
Haifa’s ancient buildings, there were no visible signs of any
hostility between the Arabs and the Christians or between the Jews and
the Arabs. He mentions "a spot of peculiar sanctity, being revered
alike by the Jews, Mohammedans and Christians", and there was a
monastery of the Carmelite order where "during one week in the
year, the Arabs bring their children and the monks bless them and
perform the ceremony of shaving their heads. The Arabs bring presents of
oil, incense and candles. After the week is over, they go away as they
came, with camels and horses and numerous wives."

Not far from Haifa, Waugh was shown a mosque "inside the
monastery cloister, and the bell for Mass every day is rung by the
Mohammedan priest."

The one city in our own
subcontinent that all foreigners avoid visiting because of the danger
of being kidnapped or killed, is Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial
capital. Here, places where recent killings occurred or bombs were set
of for killing foreigners, have become tourist sights. Early this
summer, they were thus shown to a visiting American journalist, Isabel
Hilton, by one of Karachi’s ex-Mayors, Fahim Zaman: Here, in the
forecourt of the Sheraton Hotel, is where 11 French engineers busy
building a submarine base for the Pakistani Navy were killed. And now
we’re crossing the bridge from which gunmen killed four American
employees of an oil company. A little further on, two Iranian
engineers, and here, just this morning, 12 people died and more than
50 were injured when a car packed with explosives was blown up by
ramming it against the wall of the American Consulate.

They’ve shut down the
consulate now.

Ms Hilton’s guide did
not show her either Orangi or Koraugi, Karachi’s danger areas where
migrants from India who came looking for the promised land have lived
in squalor for more than 50 years. A more recent slum area had opened
up, as it were, almost buried under piles of garbage and hugging both
sides of the city’s main storm drain, a colony of half a million
migrant Biharis and Pushtoons living in makeshift shelters in the
direct path of likely flash-floods that come every year or so.

A well-known British
artist, April Swayne Thomas, who knew India well before its Partition,
also happened to be in Karachi in the mid 1940s. She and her husband
who was in the army moved about in the highest social circles. She
mentions gay and cosmopolitan gatherings at the Gymkhana, the Boat
Club, the races. Rao Raja Hanut Singh, one of the world’s best polo
players, who, too, was in the army and posted there, was the season’s
celebrity. In her account of her days in Sind, she does not so much as
mention communal disharmony, it just wasn’t there.

Swayne Thomas and her
husband attended a wedding in the house of "The Mukhi of
Sind", who, believe it or not, was Hindu. They stayed with their
host, in a vast house built round courtyards, "charming little
place with cooing pigeons above us flowers and creepers in pots,"
and joined the family at meals. She was "amazed" by the size
of the diamonds that both the men-folk as well as the women wore. They
even joined the wedding procession, through the bazaar; the women in
carriages and the men on foot the procession was two-and-a-half miles
long.

Today when non-Muslims
in Pakistan have to keep a low profile and move about in the shadows,
a fabulously wealthy Hindu celebrating so grand a wedding would be in
the realm of fantasy. Are there enough Hindus still left in that vast
human sprawl that is Karachi to make up a procession 2.5 miles long?
After all, Pakistan’s drive to achieve ethnic purity has been a
near-total success.

Sure, we, too, in India
have masses of people living in poverty and squalor in many of our
cities, but street violence motivated by religion is rare except in
the Kashmir Valley.

When the Valley was, so
to say ‘discovered’ by the Sahibs of the East India Company after
they conquered the Punjab, they were positively stupefied by its
implausible beauty ‘Paradise on earth’ they called it. The first
Englishwoman to see it was Honoria Lawrence. In a letter to her son at
school in England, she reports: "Beauty almost beyond the power
of words...beyond that of the earth."

This was in the year
1850. The menfolk of the Company had already begun to come to it in
large numbers. In an effort to keep them out, the Maharaja enacted a
law which forbade all Europeans from owning land in Kashmir, but that
device didn’t work. They began to live on the surface of the water
in floating cottages.

The Sahibs invented
a new life-style, which caught on rapidly: Houseboat living spawned
its own social mores not compatible with Victorian concepts of
morality. The sterner officials of the company such as John Nicholson
tried vainly "to reform the moral tone of the British community
in Kashmir.

As it finally emerged,
Kashmir was the Raj’s favourite holiday resort, a place for
honeymooning couples, with overtones of wantonness.

Such was the Kashmir
that came to us in 1947, beautiful, romantic, maybe even a shade
sinful, but without so much as a trace of religious ill will. And so
it remained for more than a generation, until late in the 1980s, it
was adopted as a ‘core issue’ by the protagonists of ethnic
cleansing. It’s Paradise status was just not good enough. It had to
be pure, too.